Corsi-Rosenthal politics
Frank Helleis had an idea. His wife was a teacher at a local elementary school in their hometown Mainz, Germany. It was early in the pandemic and educators around the the world were trying to figure out how to balance the need for education and the need for safety in public health. Helleis is a professor of engineering at the Max Planck Institute for chemistry who studies aerosols, or how droplets of stuff travel in the air. His idea was to set up a unique set of fan structures above each desk in classrooms, guaranteeing a fresh airflow and reducing the threat of covid transmission. They found their setup could remove 90% of artificially generated aerosol particles in their experiments at the school. The setup was extremely low-cost and could be built by teachers and students themselves.
Myself and few people I organize with wondered: could schools in Philadelphia do something like this? Helleis's setup is a classroom-level structure that puts fans above students' desks. It's pretty elaborate. It's not clear something like that could be done in Philly, but the question connected with another idea that's much more feasible.
Engineers in the crisis
Through the education justice committee of Philly DSA I've been working with Lizzie Rothwell an organizer, parent, and architect in my neighborhood. She got national coverage for measuring the carbon dioxide levels in her son's Luke's classroom at Lea Elementary school, and we've scaled up that citizen science tactic to eleven other schools in the district. Recently, we got coverage for some of this work on WURD, a radio station focused on Black issues in the city.
Another of Lizzie's thoughts over the pandemic was to use Corsi-Rosenthal boxes (CRBs) in classrooms to help refresh the air more frequently. The CRB is basically a box fan taped to five store-bought minimum efficiency rated filters (MERV). They're easy to make, cheap to buy, and extremely effective at refreshing air. According to some reports, the boxes get clean air delivery rates between 165 and 239. Other measures from the field indicate that CRB airflow is better than some more expensive high-filtration purifying systems (HEPA).
CRBs have a story similar to Helleis' in Germany. Richard Corsi is an engineer at UC-Davis in California. In an interview with Wired magazine about what to do in the pandemic, he mentioned an idea to attach a MERV filter to a box fan. He had been in touch with James Rosenthal, the CEO of a filter company in Texas, having done work on asthma together. Corsi says that Rosenthal came up with the five-filter design. The box was an engineer's attempt to figure out how to navigate the pandemic crisis. Lizzie's idea was to use this box, priced at around $75 max, in classrooms.
Fans of fans
This isn't such a far out idea. A teacher in Newburyport, NY started using CRBs in his classroom to be safer. Hillary Creech, an Arkansas teacher's partner, made him CRBs so his classroom could have better airflow. Mark Lieberman even wrote a helpful explainer on CRBs for classrooms at EdWeek. Engineering students at Arizona State University-Tempe got together to make CRBs for local schools. The students raised money and held "box-a-thons" to build the CRBs and held events to give them to teachers in Phoenix.
The team has been working to gather donations from the community to assemble the boxes, which are then donated to K–12 classrooms throughout metro Phoenix. Student volunteers are providing the brains and muscle to put the boxes together during “box-a-thons,” build days that take place outside the School of Human Evolution and Social Change on ASU’s Tempe campus. The box-making events are usually followed a day later by pickups by local school teachers. Jehn says if need be, a student volunteer can also deliver and set up one of the box filters in a classroom. At a recent build day, students made about 50 of the cubes.
Rather than one-off approaches, the ASU case is a good example of organizing around CRBs as a tactic to combat poor ventilation in schools, which is a huge problem generally but even worse in the pandemic. In the Arkansas case, the teacher's room had a wall full of windows that didn't open. We know that school infrastructure in the United States is terrible and HVAC is particularly bad. So a CRB campaign makes a ton of sense: why not get socialists together to build CRBs and give them to teachers, students, and parents in your school district?
CRB as socialist tactic?
The ASU students in particular, but also parents and teachers around the world, are showing us a potentially powerful tactic in the fight for public health in schools but also education justice generally. Hannah Holliday, a lead organizer in Philly DSA’s education justice committee, was the first I remember to point this out and suggest a campaign move. Raising money, constructing CRBs, and distributing them to schools with poor ventilation serves an immediate need by purifying the air but it also points to the failures of our school infrastructure policy at every level.
Socialists engage in this kind of mutual aid organizing all the time. The idea of building CRBs and distributing them reminds me of the famous DSA brake light campaign that started in New Orleans and then went nationwide. Socialists provided free clinics that replaced people's brake lights on their cars to help prevent them from getting needlessly pulled over by cops (particularly POC, for whom getting pulled over for something as simple as a brake light is a matter of life and death). DSA chapters have done other mutual aid campaigns too, like fixing potholes and doing hurricane relief work.
There's been an ongoing argument in DSA over mutual aid. Certain tendencies have thought it isn't a good tactic for socialists to build class solidarity. Some even think that mutual aid is neoliberal. Though with the creation of the national Mutual Aid Working Group, I think the pro-mutual aid camp has won that argument.
Certainly, building CRBs for classrooms would put socialists in direct contact with a key terrain of the class struggle: schools. Connections with parents, students, and teachers can help build solidarity as they the structural injustices in school infrastructure policy. The demands of this campaign matter of course. Bringing in a CRB is an opportunity to create consciousness around that policy, which connects directly to capitalist ruling classes. The issue of school infrastructure, where every level of government and the unions involved all create painful gridlock, is particularly ripe for this kind of organizing, which could shake things up.
The tactic broaches key questions and activates people on the ground: Why don't schools have good ventilation systems? Why do we need to build these boxes in the first place? Because public school buildings aren't funded publicly. They're funded by massive, expensive, and punitive loans from the municipal bond market, a rapacious part of Wall Street where rich old people make money by fronting credit to school districts with high interest rates. This complex and volatile structure creates a dynamic of ambiguity, subordination, and distrust between the district and the communities it serves.
Strategically, we should note the case the Dave Pataky in British Columbia. A neuroscientist and parent, Pataky offered to build his daughter's elementary school 25 CRBs to help clean the air over Christmas break. After having two boxes in classrooms for a few months, school officials there rejected his offer to scale up saying the boxes didn't meet certain specifications of the Canadian Standard Association. The school district might do something similar in this case to save face, since the campaign might embarrass them.
But that's where the demands come in: if the demands are oriented towards financing, there's even a chance of creating solidarity with the district in the face of larger adversaries in the capitalist society they have to work within.
CRB demands
There are all kinds of important socialist demands to make with a CRB campaign. As I've written before, socialists should approach school district politics using a combined accountability and revenue framework.
1) Better district communication, transparency, and accountability viz. facilities issues. We want community involvement, oversight, and a guarantee there won't be disruptive school closures as a result of any process. This means releasing 2022 facilities analysis data, apologizing for inappropriate responses to facilities issues (like when students find dangerous ventilation issues as part of a science project and a district official demeans their work), and a People's Facilities Plan like the one proposed by Akira Drake Rodriguez. We could also try to push as many teachers as we can to report classroom issues to the PFT's Healthy Schools Tracker app.
2) A wealth tax in Philadelphia that would provide the school district with more revenue each year.
3) A Green New Deal at the state level that enforces a well-funded PlanCon reimbursement program, or some other structure like the Maintenance Provision Grant Program, to provide districts with full reimbursement for their capital expenditures rather than leaving them to fend for themselves on Wall Street.
4) A Green New Deal for Schools at the federal level that provides generous grants to districts for green infrastructure updates, including HVAC.
5) A National Investment Authority that can handle the collective action failure of this country's racial-capitalist approach to municipal infrastructure.